EU IT commissioner: No plans to pull patent directive

The European Commission has no plans to withdraw a controversial proposal on the patents for computer-implemented inventions, Commissioner for the Information Society Viviane Reding said Wednesday.

"The Commission is sticking to its proposal as it will create a level playing field for technical inventions in Europe's software industry," Reding said, speaking in Brussels to announce a five-year strategy for boosting the E.U.'s competitiveness in the IT sector.

The European Commission presented a proposal in 2002 for a directive on computer-implemented inventions, designed to give patent protection to inventors of products that depend on computer technology, such as mobile phones and domestic appliances. The proposal has been dubbed the "software patents" directive by opponents in the open-source software community who argue that it would open the door to patenting of pure software, stifling innovation by small developers who would not be able to afford the licenses needed to build on freely available code.

The issue is seen as vital for the future of IT innovation in the E.U. with large technology companies like Nokia, Philips Electronics and Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson arguing that without patent protection European companies will shift their research and development (R&D) spending to parts of the world with tougher intellectual property protection rules. Open-source software developers like Red Hat and MySQL AB argue that they will be shut out of the market by a heavy regime of patent protection. Sun Microsystems is also concerned that the directive should not be so strict in its definition of patent protection that it prevents interoperability.

Members of the directly elected European Parliament, which has joint decision-making powers over this legislation, have led a three-year long battle to ensure that the directive does not apply to computer programs, but only to technical inventions that are operated using computer technology.

Currently, the Parliament is drafting a new version of the directive that would forbid patenting of computer programs. A report, currently being drafted by former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, is due to be voted on June 20. But representatives of the European IT industry argue that the Parliament's definition of what can be patented is too restrictive and would not give new inventions the patent protection they require to justify R&D spending.

Mark McGann, director general of the European Information and Communications Technology Industries Association (EICTA), said that of the changes proposed by members of Parliament "88 percent" are unacceptable, warning that the text the Parliament advocates would rule out patent protection in the field of data processing.

E.U. member states, represented in the Council of Ministers, are expected to block the changes demanded by Parliament as they did when the legislation was first discussed in 2003-2004, forcing the two sides to enter into a special negotiating procedure called conciliation.

EICTA's McGann warned that conciliation is likely to produce a bad result for industry because the issues at stake are highly technical and legal and the necessary subtleties might be lost on the small group of members of the European Parliament and representatives of the Council who will be negotiating.

Under the E.U. decision-making process, it is at this point that the Commission can withdraw its proposal altogether

While stating that no decision has yet been taken on whether to pull the proposal, Commissioner Reding said that the Commission will watch the debate in the Parliament very closely. She pledged that she and her colleagues will ensure that the "need for innovation and interoperability" will guide the drafting of the final text of the directive. "IT companies will not be left behind," she said.